Search This Blog

My topsy turvy world of food and travel, where I toss in a good amount of childhood tales and try my hand at writing fiction. I believe in magic, a li'l bit of madness and a whole lot of thunderstorms!

Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Jungle Tales 1: The Tusker

I think it was an advertisement for Dhara Cooking Oil that
coined the tagline ‘My Daddy Strongest’. It suits my dad so aptly. He has
always been the strongest, in all spheres of his life. He spent over 18 years
amidst wildlife in Manas Wildlife Sanctuary, the period has today come to be known
as a sort of ‘Golden Era’ for the sanctuary. He has so many stories about his
life in the jungle but he never shared them with us. We would later learn about
them from members of his staff and his juniors.

Most of the stories I have heard about his adventures in the
jungle come from my mom. I can imagine what a shock it might have been to my
mom, a new bride from the city, on the ways of the jungle. Deta (that’s what I call
my dad) was a ruthless officer. He held no mercy for the poachers. Cries of
anguish would often reach Ma’s ears from the forest office, where Deta carried
out his punishment on the poachers. She would hear the poachers cry out “Aru
namaribi, Sir” (Please don’t beat me anymore, Sir) along with “Aru ketiau nokoru, Sir” (I
will never do such a thing again, Sir).

Later on when I married my husband, I would hear stories
about another forest officer whom he had known in his childhood. The punishment
he would mete out to poachers seemed very familiar until I came to know that he
was one of my dad’s juniors in Manas. No wonder the modus operandi remained the
same.

Anyway, I plan to recount to you some tales from the jungle. This one involves a huge tusker. It so happened that one day,
Deta was travelling through the jungle along with two of his junior officers.
Deta occupied the front seat of the Jeep along with the driver while the two
officers sat behind. It was quite late in the evening and the driver was driving at top
speed to reach the destination. Thick foliage and tall trees bordered the road
on both sides; stark darkness yawning beyond the twin headlights of the vehicle. Suddenly, the Jeep screeched to a halt. There stood in front of
them a big elephant – a magnificent male specimen. Its huge curved tusks glinted
ominously in the headlight of the vehicle.

The sudden appearance
of the Jeep must have shocked the elephant, who was crossing the road at that
moment. It stood motionless in the middle of the road, stunned, and then it charged towards the Jeep with a loud trumpet, raising a cloud of dust behind him. Before any one could comprehend the situation, within the fraction of a
second, the occupants of the Jeep found themselves up in thin air. The elephant
had dug its monstrous tusks into the vehicle and lifted it straight off the ground. The two
officers in the back seats tumbled out of the open door of the Jeep while the driver and Deta were still trapped inside. To his horror, the driver could feel the sharp edge of the elephant's tusk press upon his leg.

The tusker, now mad with anger, shook the Jeep like a rag doll, jerking it from side to side. Deta and the driver held on to the interiors of the Jeep for dear life. The
impact of the elephant’s action led the vehicle’s radiator to break open and hot
water poured out. It scalded the trunk of the elephant and with a sharp
cry, it banged down the Jeep on the ground with a resounding thud and fled in
to the jungle. Deta and the driver somehow managed to crawl out of the flattened
vehicle. They met up with the other officers and quickly exited the scene of
danger before the elephant decided to come back and complete his vengeance. They
walked all the way to the nearest forest office (known as ‘Beat Office’) and
spent the night there.

Next morning, another vehicle pulled along the damaged Jeep
to the main forest office. Ma remembers seeing the trampled state of the Jeep
and wondering how anyone could have survived such an incident. Deta remained
unperturbed while the driver continued to regale every one with that fateful
evening’s story. After I heard about that incident, I would imagine the figure
of a huge elephant standing by the road side every time we travelled through
the jungle at night. It still gives me shivers thinking how the story might
have ended.

So, that’s all for today. I shall be back soon with another
jungle tale. It feels so exciting thinking about those perils now that I am away
from the jungle! And yet I can’t help sighing for some reason..

Comments

Hi, I loved reading about your father's adventures in the jungle. the incident is scary. Yet your father's and his colleagues bravery in facing such an incident is really noteworthy, An ordinary person would have died of mere fright. Looking forward to more jungle tales from you...(I don't know your name :)). I have an inexplicable affinity towards forests and its dwellers..

That is a kind of great adventure..and even My dad is a Ranger now in Assam Forest Department and I have experienced riding in the jungles in Jeep and Trucks with him and I am very fond of those travels...But I miss them now..

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I was going through my food folder when I came across these pictures. It took me a while to realize that they were of the Sri Lankan Devilled Chicken I had cooked many months back. It evoked a lot of memories, all related to office, strangely. It so happened that at one time last year we were practically inundated with assignments in Sri Lanka. Our guys went ahead and came back with lot of happy stories. Mostly about food. That really got me curious about the country’s cuisine. Then, one day we started ordering lunch from a newly opened joint. They served something called Devilled Chicken and it got all the Sri Lankan food veterans unanimously declare that it was what they had tasted there. The dish did not seem complicated to me. It had a few simple ingredients and was a definite hit with the taste buds. I looked up on the internet for its recipe and it really did seem like an easy song! I decided to try the recipe out at the next opportunity. Well, I can’t seem to remember now the o…

It seems like an eon since I last wrote about food. I am
back to my blog after a long hiatus and I am still hobbling around a bit, maybe
it will take some time for me to get back my writing mojo. To be honest, I have not been experimenting much with food
lately. Have just been cooking normal stuff, barring a few twists here and
there. And then, I got a new appliance as a housewarming gift the
other day. The current hot pick of the season – the air fryer! Everywhere I
turned to, I saw people cooking with the air fryer and exclaiming what a superb
boon it was to the kitchen. I made a wry face and said “Oh yeah?” I had taken
it to be another new cooking fad, which would soon be forgotten in a few
months. I mean, I hardly cook anything in my microwave oven, except thawing/heating
food and making the random chocolate mug cake for my son. In comparison, I use
my conventional oven (OTG) much frequently. So, when I opened the carton that arrived at my home and
found the air fryer there, I did n…

For a long time, the wallpaper on my laptop featured a bird whose name elicited a disbelieved laughter from my colleague.

“Black and orange flycatcher?” he had said with a slight guffaw. “Are you sure you are not making up its name?”

He had once sent me the picture of a domestic goose from the resort he was staying in Wayanad with the caption ‘Orange-footed White Wayanad Goose’.

“It sounds like the name of my goose,” he had inferred.

Perhaps it did. But as I was saying, it had been one of my long cherished dreams to catch sight of this beautiful bird, endemic to the Nilgiris. For that to happen, we would have to pay a visit to Ooty, or Udhagamandalam.

So, like they show in the advertisement for Alto K10 car, we decided to ‘chase our passion’. The date fixed was 6th March. The itinerary comprised four birding spots – Botanical Gardens, Doddabetta and Cairns Hill Reserve in Ooty, and Sims Park at Coonoor. My humble wish list had four birds – Nilgiri laughingthrush, Nilgiri flycatcher, gre…

Just another blogger with loads of things to share, and yet not ready to give up the title of 'The Laziest Person in the World'. Do bear my ramblings and bad grammar and kindly do not copy my pictures/text. Let me know if you want anything and I will be glad to help you out. In some places I have used others' images for representation purpose, citing Google as the source (I was told then that it was the right thing). In case you stumble across your pics and want me to remove them, you can reach me at myworldfoodtravel@gmail.com. And thanks a ton for dropping by :)